The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths Read Free

than ten or twelve degrees now, and it’s the middle of the day. Decomposition doesn’t happen fast at these low temperatures, but it’s already extensive. The smell isn’t even just a smell. It has a more physical presence that that. A scent that climbs into your nostrils, occupies your sinuses. It’s like a ball of cotton wool, dense and damp, that makes breathing difficult.
    I push a window open, though crime-scene procedure would have me touch nothing.
    Morgan is terribly thin. There’s a sharpness about the way her bones poke from her skin that’s somehow agonizing. Like an African famine repainted in Welsh colors.
    Some sign of a head injury. Nothing much. I guess she fell, hurt herself, and never got up again.
    I start to explore the kitchen.
    Look inside the fridge, swing the cupboards open, look in every drawer. The kitchen sink doesn’t have cupboards beneath it, just a red gingham curtain on a piece of clothes line.
    Cutlery, crockery, pots and pans.
    Cling film, sandwich bags, old boiler manuals, oven racks.
    Kitchen cleaner, rat poison, dustpan and brush.
    But no food. None. Not anywhere.
    Not a spillage of breakfast cereal. No tin of fish, no box of cat food, no place where some dried fruit has spilled and never been cleared up. In the dustbin, I find a packet of sugar that has been torn open. Usually with sugar, when you shake an empty packet, it rustles with the glassy tinkle of sugar crystals caught in the folds at the bottom. When you think about it, in fact, it’s rare for any packaging to be completely empty. There’s always a little ketchup left in the bottle, a little sauce left in the can.
    Not here. The sugar packet looks as if it’s been sucked or licked clean. The paper’s smooth texture has become fibrous and uneven. Something similar is true of any other food waste I can find.
    I shake the packet of rat poison.
    It doesn’t rattle. It’s completely empty.
    I leave the house, putting the front door on the latch, and drive down the hill until I get a signal. Call Dunwoody.
    ‘Keeping out of trouble, are you?’ he asks.
    I don’t know what the answer to that is. I’m standing by my car, just below the cattle grid, watching a buzzard test its weight on the winds blowing up from Aberkenfig. Its armaments seem tactless somehow. Excessive.
    The bird hovers overhead as Dunwoody repeats his question.
    I still don’t know how to answer, so I just say ‘Yes.’

3.
    The next thirty minutes are spent with the logistics of death. Get a duty officer up from Neath, the divisional surgeon from Cardiff, a SOCO – scene of the crime officer – up from Swansea. It’s Dunwoody’s job to do those things really, but I find myself doing most of it. I keep him in the loop, more or less. He promises to come over ‘soon as I can’. I ask him to get a full set of phone records from the phone provider. Also bank records. Also any medical and social services records. I’d do it myself except those things are easier to do from the office.
    I also speak to Jon Breakell, who says T.M. Baron has been traced to an address in Leicester.
    ‘And you’re going to tell me that Dunwoody has got some uniforms kicking down the doors.’
    ‘Not exactly, but this kind of changes things, I guess.’
    ‘Just a bit.’
    I hang up.
    I’m parked just below the cattle grid, but within sight of the open moorland. From where I am, I can count six sheep, but there will be dozens more, roaming the hill, cropping the grass, disturbing the grouse and the pipits, the skylarks and the plovers. There are enough sheep on this hill to feed a family for years. Hayley Morgan died as next season’s roast dinner grazed the verge beyond her kitchen window.
    There’s only one road up to the cottage and when a clean blue Passat noses its way up the road, I travel with it. The Passat discharges one SOCO, Gavin Jones, and a plump Detective Sergeant, who turns out to be Bob Shelton, the duty officer from Neath. Jones has a porn star